The Haircut...

Every once in a while I wander “down the hill” to Rancho San Diego to get a haircut.  For several years now I've been patronizing a barbership owned by an Iraqi immigrant.  The barbers are mostly Iraqi as well, though not all of them.  This is unsurprising, as in the general El Cajon area (including Rancho San Diego and Jamul town) there is a large and thriving Iraqi expatriate community.

The owner, who often takes care of me himself, speaks English with a very thick accent.  I often have trouble understanding him.  Yesterday I went down for my semi-annual haircut (just kidding – I go at least three times a year), and the owner greeted me, then motioned me aside, out of earshot of the other barbers and customers.

“Err hou choo?” he asked.  I didn't comprehend, and I let him know.  We went back and forth a few times, both of us a little frustrated, until finally it dawned on me what he was asking: “Are you a Jew?”

I suppose my beard (a white Santa Claus-style beard that I don't trim very often) got him wondering.  But the fact that he asked got the ponder going.  Why did he care?  Would he refuse to serve Jews?  Did Jews require the use of special clippers?  Perhaps only certain barbers would work on Jews?  I didn't like where any of these thoughts were going.

So I told him I was not a Jew – and I asked him why he wanted to know.

With his thick accent, it took me a while to understand what he was telling me, but I'm very glad I took the trouble.

My barber is a Chaldean, an Iraqi Christian.  There are many Chaldeans here, refugees from Saddam, and over the years I've learned a bit about their history.  Amongst the things I knew: the Chaldeans were responsible for forcing many Jews to leave Iraq.  In general, relations between Chaleans and Jews have been less than cordial. Much less.

But the message from my barber wasn't what I'd expect, given that background.  What my barber finally managed to convey to me was this: the reason he wanted to know if I was Jewish is because he wanted to be certain that he never charged a Jew for a haircut – even if that Jew came in every day for a trim.

Why?

Because my barber's two sons and his brother were saved from Saddam in 1999 by Jews in his home town in northern Iraq.  Jews whom Saddam treated even more cruelly than he did Chaldeans.  Jews who truly had no reason to be friendly to their Chaldean neighbors.  Jews who nonetheless risked their lives to hide my barber's family from the Iraqi troops bent on arresting and executing them, and then smuggled them over the border to Syria, from where they eventually escaped to asylum the U.S.

So no Jew pays for a haircut at my barber's shop.  And I have a new reason to patronize him.  I'm not sure he wants his story widely known, so I'm not going to publish his name, or that of his barbershop.  But if you know Rancho San Diego, you can probably figure it out...

ClimateGate: Roundup...

James Delingpole smells fear amongst the warmenists...

USA Today on scientists' reactions to the AGW debate and the rise of AGW skepticism after ClimateGate...

Oops – global warming didn't kill those lovely Costa Rican toads after all...

All I Ask...

All Quin Hillyer wants from Obama is a little humility:

A little humility would be nice. So would a sense that he answers to the public rather than to some self-proclaimed (and self-determined) imperative of history and/or call of destiny. What Obama seems to fail to understand is that his own, overblown self-assurance and self-mythologizing is actually hampering his own goals. One need not stretch too far to observe that one of the factors adding to public opposition to Obamacare is a growing public disquietude about the lack of responsiveness, the authoritarian certitude, and the zealous near-fanaticism of the government that would run the new health-rationing system – all character traits as embodied by the president himself.

Read the rest of his piece, it's all good...

Quote of the Day...

This post could just as well have been titled a flying pig moment.  This is from that bastion of progressive propaganda, Newsweek:

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.

My blunt title for their article is How the Unions are Destroying U.S. Education.  They title it Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers.  Either way, it's extraordinary to see a piece like this in Newsweek.  It's the end time, folks, it must be...

Obamacare is About Statism...

Mark Steyn on Obamacare:

Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

Don't miss the rest of it.

Yon: Saving the Life of a British Soldier...

Hundreds of people and millions of dollars...and a young soldier is still alive today...

Geert Wilders at the House of Lords...

Friday Geert Wilders was in London (and not detained this time), where he gave a rousing speech to the U.K. House of Lords.  One of many passages I liked:

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in another policy, it is time for change. We must make haste. We can't wait any longer. Time is running out. If I may quote one of my favourite American presidents: Ronald Reagan once said: "We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow". That is why I propose the following measures, I only mention a few, in order to preserve our freedom:

First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. In Europe and certainly in the Netherlands, we need something like the American First Amendment.

Second, we will have to end and get rid of cultural relativism. To the cultural relativists, the shariah socialists, I proudly say: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Don't be affraid to say it. You are not a racist when you say that our own culture is better.

Third, we will have to stop mass immigration from Islamic countries. Because more Islam means less freedom.

Fourth, we will have to expel criminal immigrants and, following denaturalisation, we will have to expel criminals with a dual nationality. And there are many of them in my country.

Fifth, we will have to forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe. Especially since Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia are mistreated, there should be a mosque building-stop in the West.
And last but not least, we will have to get rid of all those so-called leaders. I said it before: Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills. Let's elect real leaders.

Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills.  Oh, yes.  Faster, please.  As they say, read the whole thing.

Vision of the Annointed...

Investor's Business Daily has a great interview with the always-interesting Thomas Sowell.  A sample – Sowell explaining what he means by the “Vision of the Annointed”:

It's the theory that there is an elite group of people who are very knowledgeable and their knowledge should be used to guide the decisions of society. So they are not simply an elite in the sense that sinecurists might be an elite, but they are elite with an anointed role in the world. To put it uncharitably, as someone once said, "Born booted and spurred to ride mankind." Examples of that would not be hard to find in Washington, D.C.